The Blogg

Scott Adams today touched on a topic that I first thought about in the context of flood insurance circa Hurricane Katrina. The supposed purpose of insurance (though this has been perverted in the case of health and life insurance) is to spread risk over the population. With a large number of participants and an event that affects individuals randomly and at a fairly predictable rate, it makes sense for all participants to pay into a pool from which those affected by an event are compensated with the overhead going to profit for a broker. But when we are talking about an event that, if it occurs, will affect a large percentage of the participants, this breaks down.

If everyone in Louisiana (or Californian earthquake survivors) files a claim for the value of their home in the same year, there is no way the insurer will have the assets to be able to pay them. One option for the company would be to borrow enough cash to pay those claims and pay down the debt with premiums from future years, but they could also simply declare bankruptcy and leave all of their customers with nothing. Seeing the financial meltdown over the last two years, I suppose they would actually buy insurance against having to make a large payout from a larger company, who would in turn try to offset their risk. In theory this might allow the whole system to work, but it seems just as likely that all of these companies would fail together.

If you were an evil genius, as we have seen a great number of Wall Street executives are, why not create a flood / earthquake / etc insurance company, sell lots of policies, and have no intention of ever paying on them? The worst that happens is that you dissolve the company, take the boatloads of money you have earned in salary over the years, and start a new one. I am sure there are all sorts of regulations on insurers requiring them to hold a certain percentage of their total potential liability in semi-liquid assets, but doing so to the extent that would be necessary to cover these kinds of widespread disasters would make the entire enterprise untenable.

I suppose the same problem exists with any transaction in which you pay a fee now for the promise of a service in the future, but insurance against natural disasters seems like an especially easy way to throw a lot of money into what could be essentially a legal scam.

If you are unaware, a few weeks ago someone hacked into the servers of a climatologist research group and released emails and other documents that have created quite a stir. You can read about it on wikipedia or a news article. In light of the current summit in Copenhagen, I thought it was time to put down a few thoughts inspired by the recent events and general anthropogenic global warming controversy.

1: I am glad that my research is of no particular interest to more than a few dozen people and will certainly not be driving any governmental policy decisions. I can see plenty of analogues to the controversial e-mails in my own archives. Phil Jones wrote about a “trick” to “hide” a data anomaly. I’ve gone back and forth with my co-authors about the best way to present data; a logarithmic scale is much more informative, but they insisted that a linear scale was necessary for people just glancing through to realize how impressive the results were. Michael Mann urged colleagues to stop publishing at a journal that he believed was publishing politically-motivated articles. Someone I work with warned others in a specific research community when a new journal in that field was created with an editorial board full of people who had never published work in that field in any well-known venue. I would not care to have to explain myself to raging hordes convinced I was guilty of fraud.

2: Although I do not find much damning evidence in the leaked documents, some of the other things I have read about are disturbing. In a relatively unimportant field like mine it would be wrong to refuse to provide my data and methods to anyone who asked. The credibility of any result is directly proportional to the ability of others to reproduce it. In a field that will shape society for the next decade, it is downright immoral to hold back this information for intellectual property reasons. (For the record, I know of two researchers unaffiliated with me who are using my code. Feel free to download ch-htn-tools-1.0.tar.gz if you would like.)

3: It is probably the best that can be done under the circumstances, but it seems that most of what climatologists do is only science by a very broad definition. With data that goes back half a century, proxy data that allows us to guess at much older values but depends on its own set of questionable assumptions, and an extremely complex system that cannot be duplicated and that usually operates on a scale of millennia, testing hypotheses becomes rather difficult. If a theory has no predictive power that can be validated, then it is of limited use. (My own work and much computer science research can similarly be derided as unscientific. In my world the really interesting thing is the invention of a way to solve a problem, and then we tack on experimental studies of that methodology to add a veneer of sciency-ness.)

4: This is but one of many examples, but it is truly amazing how often people believe that they are more qualified than experts to have an opinion on a topic. I have an opinion on most everything (as you readers know), but I do not assume myself to be superior to those who actually know what they are talking about. Climate change is indeed up for debate, as is just about anything else. But that does not mean it is a matter of opinion, or that what is true for me might not be true for you. You can believe that scientists are wrong, or are falsifying global warming to usher in a worldwide fascist regime, or secretly know that vaccines cause autism but are bribed into lying by pharmaceutical companies. But unless you can offer actual evidence supporting one of those theories, it is not clear to me why anyone should care what you believe about it.

5: As per #4, you should not care what I think about climate change since I am far from an expert on the subject, but I will tell you anyway. If the majority of experts in the field believe that global temperatures are rising and that carbon dioxide emissions are the primary cause (they do), then I do too. The fact that it seems colder where I am than last year is not strong enough evidence to discredit their years of work, nor is the fact that the climate has (very slowly) changed in the past without human intervention. This does not mean that I think the joint statement from the IPCC has it all figured out; just that they have come to the most reasonable conclusion based on the available data. What, if any, policy changes should be enacted is an entirely different and unscientific question. That leads to my next thought.

6: If, as seems to be the consensus, we are already in a bad position and getting worse everyday, it is going to require some serious sacrifices to avert disaster. In my (non-expert) opinion, the kind of policies that would be necessary to reverse such a trend would never be accepted. There is simply no way that developing countries will agree not to use early industrial technology unless we either find a reasonably priced alternative energy source (looks unlikely in the near future), give them absolutely enormous sums of money (not going to happen), or bomb them into extinction (not exactly a positive outcome). First-world countries should be able to hold the line on emissions relatively painlessly, but making significant cuts will be impossible without most Americans giving up luxuries they have become accustomed to, and I do not see the political will to do so. If the climatologists are correct, the next two decades are going to be very interesting times.

7: Finally, I do not think the leaked CRU documents reveal any egregious ethical violations. But suppose you believed firmly and completely that the world as you knew it was going to be destroyed unless you did something. Would you be willing to commit fraud if necessary to avert this disaster? I have to think the answer is yes. Replace fraud with any other moral, legal, or ethical lapse and I think the answer remains the same. Surety can be rather frightening. I was reading somewhere else (sorry, I no longer recall where, nor looked for proof) that a scientist was discouraged from doing some certain research because it might produce results that contradict the consensus on global warming and that to risk this would be immoral. What kind of nonsense is that? But it makes perfect sense if you already know that you are right, which is an entirely unscientific mindset.

Football season, Conan moving to the Tonight Show, and new episodes of The Office, House, and Family Guy mean that I have been watching a relatively large amount of television recently. I could record everything and then skip commercials while watching later, but they do not generally bother me that much. I’ve said it before: if you introduce me to a product that I was previously unaware of and have a use for, there is a very good chance your advertisement might lead to a sale. If you provide me with valuable information or a good laugh and all other things are equal, I might choose you over a competitor as thanks. But awful advertisements guarantee that I will never, ever be a customer of yours.

We are now in the Scranton / Wilkes-Barre market, although fairly far away from those cities, and there are some truly terrible commercials for local businesses. Toyota Scion of Scranton is the worst of the worst. I cannot find a video, so you will have to imagine the awfulness from my description. The basic, moronic premise of the advertisement is that you should choose the dealership from which you buy your car based on your small child’s preference, rather than price, service, or anything else. The tagline is “Don’t let your kid get hosed, come to Toyota Scion of Scranton!”. Along the way we get to see simply dreadful acting by a young boy, a girl who somehow cannot speak clearly, and incredibly annoying spring sound effects as the girl jumps around washing a car in giant boots. They have a second one in which the girl is at the dealership and still bad, but not nearly on the same level.

The runner-up in awful commercials for local businesses is attorneys Lenahan & Dempsey. I like the premise of their clip: that insurance companies are evil money-grubbing entities making the rich richer, and that the only way to get a fair deal from them is with the services of these lawyers. While it is a bit over the top, the type of people in a position to need their services are probably already in this frame of mind. But the acting is again positively heinous. A very old, rich looking man either laughingly turns down claims or explains doing so to his grandchildren (depending on the ad), then reacts in horror when he finds that the people he has been saying “no” to have called Lenahan & Dempsey. You can see one of these for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoo3v3rVqDA. You might think that lawyers might want to maintain some dignity so that they can look their clients, opposing counsel, and judges in the eye, but apparently not,

I believe We Do Metal Roofs is actually a national organization, but perhaps not. Their commercial does not include gimmicky acting and actually explains why their service may be economical in the long run, so it sounds like exactly the kind of advertisement I would praise. There are very amateurish graphics, but I can live with that. What makes this terrible is that at several points in the clip there is a very loud siren-like sound. Presumably the intent is to attract your attention even if you have been tuning it out, but the result is that I want to punch whoever wrote it.

Southwest Airlines is running several different commercials focusing on the fact that they have no luggage fees, which is fine. In one of them a woman says “$20 for the first bag, then $30 for the next — round-trip that’s almost $100!”. Yeah, I guess $100 is almost $100 under a loose definition of almost. There was one more that I wanted to complain about, but I cannot seem to remember what it was. If I come up with it, I will update.

Bonus note: I generally do not really watch Late Night with Jimmy Fallon because it is almost pathetic how unfunny he is. Since it does come on after the Tonight Show, however, I usually have it on in the background. I was very pleased to happen to hear Chick Corea sitting in with house band The Roots tonight, playing snippets from “Spain” and other great songs. Also the musical guest is They Might Be Giants. This should make it worth watching even if I have to sit through an embarrassing monologue and “lick it for 10″.

UPDATE: Having seen it again, I now remember what the other questionable advertisement was. Verizon is running one in which, to save money, the patriarch of a household turns off the hot water, only drives halfway to locations and makes his daughter walk the rest of it, and eschews electric lighting. In addition, he switches the family’s cell service to Verizon. This is ok, but do you really want to leave viewers with the impression that becoming one of your customers is a sacrifice on this level? I guess they can get away with this because they have run so many other commercials lauding the quality of their service, but it seems like someone did not quite think it through.

UPDATE 2: You can see the We Do Metal Roofs example at http://www.metalroofs.tv/index2.html, it is the first one with the woman standing in front of the American Flag pickup truck.

UPDATE: See comments that clarify that my understanding of this was not quite accurate.

I saw on the news this morning that someone had released a small game for the iPhone platform in which the player would calm down a crying and screaming baby by shaking it. Apple pulled the game from its application store when they realized the abject stupidity of it. Don’t take me to be a Jack Thompson fan, nothing could be further from the truth!, but this is simply irresponsible. There are (apparently) lots of people who are somehow unaware that shaking an infant can easily result in severe trauma or death. There are not people who are unaware that the actions taken by the protagonist of GTA4 are less than wise or virtuous.

Perhaps this could be a new opportunity for serial killers: convincing large numbers of other people to take actions that they believe to be safe but are actually quite dangerous.

Do you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books? I had completely forgotten about them until today. The market was flooded for them, so you could pick up a stack for a quarter a piece at yard sales. I amassed quite a library through such means, and it probably included 30 examples of this genre. When reading them I always tried to take the “correct” path first, but I would also use my fingers as bookmarks to be able to go back and explore the entire space of results. I imagine I made a rather comical sight trying to turn a page while keeping eight fingers spread throughout the book. It can’t have been good for the spine either, but at that price I did not really care.

I was reminded of this because I was a link to Survive The Outbreak, a modern-day version. (Warning, violence and profanity aplenty.) I am not sure that the multimedia version works quite as well, but it was a great creative idea. (Unless there were predecessors of which I am unaware.) It could have been a bit longer and I would have liked to see less footage reuse, but even as is I am sure it required an incredible amount of effort from the creators. Of course, I explored every part of the tree. My first attempt got only to the third level before I died a horrible, painful death.

You’ve probably heard about the closing of Circuit City and how they jacked up their prices so they could offer deep discounts that would leave their merchandise still more expensive than the same thing at many other retailers. There is another business near me that seems to be closing very poorly. A year or two ago D&D Home Furnishings moved from a dwindling shopping center near our apartment to one even closer with, I am sure, significantly higher rent. They had a sale at the old location to avoid moving stock, but we still found the prices to be fairly steep.

They are now going out of business, and have been doing so for at least two months. During this time they have been running regular television advertisements and are paying at least three people to stand at major intersections holding large signs all day every day. I suppose that sticking the signs in the ground would be trespassing but somehow having a person stand there and hold it is not. Perhaps these efforts have slightly increased sales, but to me they seem like a giant waste of money that could be going to the creditors who are getting screwed by the bankruptcy ruling.

My wife grew up with a cat and has wanted to have one herself ever since moving out of her parents’ home. This was not possible while she was still in medical school, but now that she has some downtime before she starts residency she has finally decided that it was time. On Saturday she picked up a 9-week old tiger-striped tabby from an adoption day at a pet store in Reading. I’ve not been looking forward to this day in particular, but I find cats to be tolerable and, if no work is required of me, perhaps even pleasant to have around.

Fortunately, the one she purchased is litter trained and quite sociable. In fact, getting her to go away from you for a few minutes can be difficult. Yesterday we had some friends over to watch the Eagles game, and she was not at all shy about all of the people, and in particular wanted to play with the toddler. She does have a bit of a problem with biting, and the experience of the last two days makes it likely that we will have accidental scratch marks for most of the next 5 months while she still has her front claws.

Unfortunately, she is exceptionally curious and has not yet learned to understand the phrase “No!”. She *loves* laptop keyboards, which makes it rather difficult to work when she is nearby. She managed to type and send an email for me, the body of which was “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZXVGGGGGGGGGB9″. There are a number of surfaces where she is not allowed: the kitchen counter and table, the desk, the digital piano, and the open part of our TV stand. Of course, these are the most tantalizing places, and at one point last night she was moving from one to the next as soon as my wife would see her on one, scold her, and put her on the floor. This probably happened 20 times in as many minutes. Most disturbingly for me, she decided to climb on the uninterruptible (hah!) power supply and hit a switch, cutting electricity to all of my “essential” computers.

Other than a tiny bathroom, our apartment consists of only two separate rooms, and the cat is not allowed in the bedroom. (In addition to loving cats, my wife is also mildly allergic to them.) This means that there is nowhere we can put her to keep her away from us for a short time. Eating breakfast on the couch this morning was a challenge, to say the least.

We have decided to name her Zoe, the Greek for “life”. However, my wife insists that the word “Zoe” is pronounced similarly to “Joe”, and that we should thus spell her name “Zoie”. I have not yet managed to convince her otherwise, so please comment to add your voice of reason to mine.

(Perhaps part of a continuing series with this.)

Today I filled my gas tank at the Wawa at the intersection of 8th Avenue and Schoenersville Road in Bethlehem, as I usually do when it gets low. Sitting on top of the pump was a placard that read “Save money with Wawa no-fee ATMs.” Below that was a picture of a woman with the quote “I saved $24.50 in one month!”, then in fine print “Based on average fee of $1.75.”

If you are using an ATM machine 14 times in a month, you probably need to cut back on spending or make larger withdrawals at a time. More importantly, it you are using an ATM that requires a convenience fee 14 times in a month, you are an idiot. In addition to places like Wawa, you could just go to a branch of your bank to avoid a fee. In my entire life, I think I have paid about 6 ATM fees because I found myself unexpectedly in a situation where I wanted cash quickly.

I just heard a radio advertisement that included this:

The prices of gold and other precious metals are at an all-time high! In fact, these are the highest prices since the 1980s!

I suppose this is not technically a contradiction, but “highest since the 1980s” strongly implies that they were higher in the 1980s or before.

I’ve written before about the radio stations available in my listening area, 95.1 WZZO, 99.9 WODE, and 102.9 WMGK. Now there is a new entrant in the field, 107.1 WWYY “The Bone”, which I am aware of only because of a short blurb in the morning paper a few weeks ago. I had high hopes for WWYY being more attuned to my listening preferences, but it seems to be coming up short. They are trying very hard to differentiate themselves from WZZO, but I can’t say I see much difference. Of the things I dislike about WZZO: Wasting inordinate amounts of airtime on self-promotion? Check. Creepy announcer voice? Check. Playing Top-40ish modern rock dreck? Check (and in spades!). At least they don’t (I think) spend their Sunday afternoon airtime on NASCAR coverage.

The funniest part of their ad campaign is a series of announcements where they play a snippet of a song that “ZZO thinks rocks” — I’ve heard Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’, Styx’s Come Sail Away, and Steve Miller Band’s Swingtown. At first glance, this looks like a reasonable marketing strategy. The songs they are denigrating WZZO for playing are all great, but to say that they “rock”, in the sense of loud, aggressive guitars would be disingenuous. The problem is, WWYY plays other songs that I would describe precisely the same way. Most humorously, I heard one of these ads directly after they played 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins. Now don’t get me wrong, the Pumpkins are listenable once you get past Corgan’s voice, but I can’t imagine anyone saying that 1979 “rocks” in the sense described above.

You know what I would really like out of a radio station? About 45% of their material should be in the genre I would call “classic hard rock”, as exemplified by the music of AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, Thin Lizzy, Blue Oyster Cult, Van Halen, and the like. Another 25% should be what I call “classic heavy metal”, such as the work of Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Ozzy Osbourne. Modern Electric Blues, such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Kenny Wayne Shepherd should get about 5% of airtime. The remaining 25% should be the harder side of music commonly called “classic rock”, from Aqualung to Whole Lotta Love. I don’t mean to say that nothing written after 1985 should be played, just that the music should be similar to the style that was popular then. I know of at least two “new” bands, Velvet Revolver and Wolfmother who are writing new material in 2007 that fits nicely in this framework. I am sure there are many others of whom I am unaware. Additionally, many of the bands that defined the loose genre descriptions above are still recording, but radio stations seem only to play the music of their prime. What is new-ish but not in an appropriate style? Grunge, nu-metal, and alt-modern rock like Hinder and Breaking Benjamin.

Beyond this genre shift, I have one more important requirement for a good radio station: they must reach deep into the back catalogs of great music, and not just play the “hits”. In all the time I’ve listened to radio, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Blue Oyster Cult song other than (Don’t Fear) The Reaper and Burnin’ For You. Maybe Cities On Flame, but I don’t think so. They’ve released 14 albums of original material, most of which would be suitable. Thin Lizzy has a similarly large and excellent body of work, but you won’t hear much other than The Boys Are Back In Town and, if you are lucky, Jailbreak. There is really no reason I should hear the same song on the radio more than once in a week.

Of course that isn’t the only kind of radio station I would like; just the most likely to happen. I’d also love to have a classic rock station that doesn’t just play singles. Whatever happened to Album-Oriented Rock anyway? And a good jazz station. ( That’s spelled J-A-Z-Z, not “smooth jazz” or “easy listening” or “new age” or any other nonsense destined for “Charlie Parker’s personal hell”. ) And a ska/punk station. And a funk and soul station. Etc.

I suppose the perfect radio station is a pipe dream; I shall have to continue to do most of my listening from my own library, even if it does not provide an opportunity to hear new talent, and from customizable Internet radio streams. At least for when I am driving, I now have a significantly better chance of finding at least one station not in commercial break at any given moment.